More big names at WSOPE Day 2 - Laak loves badminton.

Saturday, 25 September 2010

We went to the three-table area under the stairs, behind the main bar, to find Phil Laak discussing badminton with Tony Cousineau: “Badminton? Is that the game where you hit it [mimes serve] and it goes all fast like whooooooooaaaash [mimes fast shuttlecock] and then all like phwoooooooooaaaarm [mimes shuttlecock slowing down]? You hit the little bird? Yeah, I LOVE badminton!”

Seated at the table next to him is none other than Viktor Blom. The man who shuns the spotlight –a big, bright spotlight tends to hone in on you when you beat Tom “durrrr” Dwan out of $5.5m and then lose it back while playing the three best in the world at once – is in a suitably inconspicuous seat, caressing his big stack of 5,000 chips. BREAKING NEWS: he spoke. We heard him laugh during a hand analysis discussion: “You fold K-J there?!” he chuckled. Scandinavian accents are weird.

The dubiously fortunate person to have position on Blom is Isabelle Mercier, who by now you should know is no relation to Jason – he just doubled with J-J on an eight high board against the nut flush draw, incidentally. So far we have lost two tables’ worth of players as we approach the first 20-minute break of the day. These include Bluff Europe favourite Neil Channing; WSOPE 2010 PLO champion Jeff Lisandro and EPT/WPT 2010 winner Jake Cody, who won’t take down the Triple Crown in one year.

Oh, and some guy called Phil Ivey just won a 50,000ish pot. He check-raised the nut flush on the river and got Nicolas Levi to pay him off. Ivey is now up to about 150,000 and Levi has dropped down to just below six figures.

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